Part 13 (2/2)

SELF-DISPLAY OR BOLDNESS. The most obvious type of consciousness of self is found in individuals who seek mere social conspicuousness, who spend no inconsiderable part of their energy in deliberate display. The child says with nave frankness, ”See how high I can jump.” Many adults find more conspicuous or subtle ways of saying the same thing.

One need only to take a ride in a bus or street car to find the certain symptoms of self-display. These may consist in nothing more serious than a peculiarly conspicuous collar or hatband, or particularly high heels. It may consist in a loud voice full of pompous references to great banquets recently attended or great sums recently spent. It may be in a raised eyebrow or a disdainful smile. There are people among every one's acquaintance whose conversation is largely made up of reminiscences of more or less personal glory, of deliberate allusions to large salaries and famous friends, to glorious prospects and past laurels.[1]

[Footnote 1: Almost every college cla.s.s has one or two members who enter vociferously and continuously into discussions, less for the contribution of ideas or information than for the propagation of their own personalities.]

On a larger scale this is to be found in the almost universal desire to see one's name in print:

There is a whole race of beings to-day whose pa.s.sion is to keep their names in the newspapers, no matter under what heading, ”arrivals and departures,” ”personal paragraphs,” ”interviews”--gossip, even scandal will suit them if nothing better is to be had.

Guiteau, Garfield's a.s.sa.s.sin, is an example of the extremity to which this craving for notoriety may go in a pathological case. The newspapers bounded his mental horizon; and in the poor wretch's prayer on the scaffold, one of the most heartfelt expressions was: ”The newspaper press of this land has a big bill to settle with thee, O Lord!”[2]

[Footnote 2: James: _loc. cit._, vol. I, p. 308.]

As was pointed out in connection with praise and blame, more of our actions than we should care to admit are determined by this desire for recognition. The loud, the vulgar, the notoriety seekers are merely extreme ill.u.s.trations of a type of self that most of us are some of the time.

SELF-SUFFICIENT MODESTY. The other extreme is exhibited by the type of personality that is markedly averse to display and shrinks from observation. In its intensest and possibly least appealing form it is exhibited by people who become awkwardly embarra.s.sed in the presence of a stranger, however fluent and vivacious they may be with their friends.

This type at its best may be described by the epithet of self-sufficient modesty. To be such a person may be said to be an achievement rather than a weakness. To be self-sufficient and modest at the same time means that one is going about one's business, that one is too absorbed in one's work to be continually and anxiously noting what sort of figure one cuts in the world. To quote Matthew Arnold's well-known lines:

”Unaffrighted by the silence round them, Undistracted by the sights they see, These demand not that the things without them Yield them love, amus.e.m.e.nt, sympathy.”[1]

[Footnote 1: _Self-Dependence._]

There are in every great university quiet great men who steadily pursue vital and difficult researches without the slightest reference or desire for cheap conspicuousness. In every profession and business there are known to the discriminating men who are experts, even geniuses in their own field, but who shrink back from the loudness of publicity as from a plague. There are a number of wealthy philanthropists in all our large cities who consistently and steadily do good works in almost complete anonymity. One finds in almost every department of human activity these types of self-effacing men who find their fulfillment in the work they do rather than in moving in the aura of other people's admiration.

THE POSITIVE AND FLEXIBLE SELF. But in order to be effective in affairs, some positive force must be displayed, and modesty need not mean pusillanimity. A frequently observable type of personality--and socially one of a highly desirable sort--is the type of man who, himself standing for positive convictions, ideas, and principles of action, and not casually to be deflected from them, has sufficient flexibility and sensitivity to the feelings of others, to accept modification. Such a self not only has its initial force and momentum, but gains as it goes by the experience of others. A personality must be positive to contribute to the solution of difficulties and the management of enterprises, but it must be receptive in order to benefit by the ideas of others and cooperate with them.

To have power and humility at once is sometimes sufficient to make a leader among men. Humility prevents us from rus.h.i.+ng headlong along the paths of our own dogmatic errors; it enables us further to deal with other people who would be simply antagonized by our flat-footed insistence on every detail of our own initial position. The history of great statesmans.h.i.+p is in part, at least, the history of wise compromise.

Nor does this mean sordid temporizing and opportunism. As John Morley puts it:

It is the worst of political blunders to insist on carrying an ideal set of principles into execution, where others have rights of dissent, and those others persons whose a.s.sent is as indispensable to success as it is difficult to attain. But to be afraid or ashamed of holding such an ideal set of principles in one's mind in their highest and most abstract expression, does more than any other one cause to stunt or petrify those elements of character to which life should owe most of its savor.[1]

[Footnote 1: Morley: _On Compromise_, p. 123.]

DOGMATISM AND SELF-a.s.sERTION. Too often, however, a person of powerful and distinctive opinions is so moved by the momentum of his own strong enthusiasms, so fixed by the habitual definiteness of his own position that he cannot be swayed. In its worst form this is rampant egoism and dogmatism.

All of us have met the loud-mouthed exponent of his own opinions, who speaks whatever be the subject, as if _his_ position only were plausible or possible, and as if all who gain-said him were either fools or knaves.

If we examine the mental furniture of the average man we shall find it made up of a vast number of judgments of a very precise kind upon subjects of very great variety, complexity, and difficulty. He will have fairly settled views upon the origin and nature of the universe, and upon what he will probably call its meaning; he will have conclusions as to what is to happen to him at death and after, as to what is and what should be the basis of conduct. He will know how the country should be governed, and why it is going to the dogs, why this piece of legislation is good and that bad. He will have strong views upon military and naval strategy, the principles of taxation, the use of alcohol and vaccination, the treatment of influenza, the prevention of hydrophobia, upon munic.i.p.al trading, the teaching of Greek, upon what is permissible in art, satisfactory in literature, and hopeful in science.

The bulk of such opinions must necessarily be without rational basis, since many of them are concerned with problems admitted by the expert to be still unsolved, while as to the rest it is clear that the training and experience of no average man can qualify him to have any opinion on them at all.[1]

[Footnote 1: Trotter: _Instincts of the Herd_, p. 36.]

In action as well as opinion dogmatism and unbridled self-a.s.sertion may be the dominant characteristics of a personality.

The man who has a strong will and little social sympathy will be ruthlessly insistent on the attainment of his own ends. This type of self has indeed been set up as an ideal by such philosophers as Nietzsche and Max Stirner, who urged that the really great man should express his own personality irrespective of the weaklings whom he might crush in his comet-like career. Thus writes Nietzsche in one of his characteristic pa.s.sages:

The _Superman_ I have at heart; _that_ is the first and only thing to me--and _not_ man: not the neighbor, not the poorest, not the sorriest, not the best....

In that ye have despised, ye higher men, that maketh me hope....

In that ye have despaired, there is much to honor. For ye have not learned to submit yourselves, ye have not learned petty policy.

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